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OKEx Technical Bug Made Me A Billionaire Today

May 22th, OKEx, the third largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, announced that withdrawal services and fiat trading have been suspended. The move came after users posted snapshots showing their huge crypto “windfall” in their OKEx account.

These users jokingly said “I’m now a billionaire on OKEx”. From the discussions on social media, OKEx seems to have two severe bugs at around 19:00 p.m.(GMT+8):

1. Account display error. When user A transfers 10,000 USDT to user B, B will receive the 10,000 USDT, but A’s account sees no decrease in USDT amount; And a few user’s account balance was not displayed accurately.

2. Abnormal cryptocurrency price. The traded price of BTC/USDT dropped to $6,002 from $8,220 all of a sudden and quickly came back to normal; And ETH/USDT abnormally increased to $736.

Their sudden wealth was a flash in the pan and billionaire illusion collapsed soon, after OKEx made an announcement saying

“Due to a technical error, the account balances of a few of our users are not displayed accurately. Of course, you can rest assured that your funds are safe, secured, and not affected by the recent update. We are currently fixing the issue and have suspended withdrawal service and fiat trading. A further announcement will be made after the services resume…”

By the noon of May 23 (Beijing time), its website was still not working. Prior to press time, OKEx made a further update that suspended businesses were estimated to resume approximately 17:00 May 23 (Hong Kong time).

It is not the first time OKEx has such incidents. A month ago, OKEx announced to suspend all ERC-20 token deposits after developers discovered an Ethereum Smart Contract bug called BatchOverflow which permits those who exploit the bug to issue an almost unlimited number of new tokens.

Apart from technical bugs, the exchange seemed to have some personnel problems. Recently its former CEO Chris Lee has joined its rival exchange Huobi.

At the press time, OKB is trading at $4.05, down 15.96% on the day, with the market cap of $1.4 billion and 24-hour trading volume being $282 million.